Latin II: The "feelgood mass"

In the first part of this essay I said that Pope Benedict's reputation would suffer from his decision to reintroduce the Latin Mass on a broader scale.

Some readers said I needed a reality check: the old Latin rite was, for them, more satisfying than the Vatican II liturgy. I can't argue with another's experience. I will argue that today's Mass is better suited to achieve the true purposes of religion -- to have the community hear God's word and act on it.

I admire Pope Benedict's travels through Europe, Turkey, and Brazil to preach reconciliation and peace. The press has, perhaps disproportionately, focused on his gaffs -- his statements on Islamic culture and the allegedly benign Spanish conquest of Latin America.

But, whatever his motives, encourageing the Latin Mass will be remembered as a futile attempt to turn back the clock, sometimes splitting congregations into cliques, while the masses of the Catholic people are calling for the church to move into the 21st century.

The recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly tells the story of a Chinese Jesuit bishop imprisoned for many years by the Communist regime. Ater his release in the 1980s, the bishop made his first task the translation of the Latin Mass into Chinese. The Communist government objected; they wanted the Mass in Latin, where it would not be understood. They sensed that the Mass in their own language would empower the people to start thinking for themselves.

Let us consider the expressed reasons for the return to Latin.

This would reconcile the members of the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's break-away church, who, in reaction to the reforms of Vatican II, rejected both the new liturgy and the Council's teachings. But the excommunicated leader of the Lefebvrites, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has made it clear, in an interview with the conservative National Catholic Register, that these minor gestures mean zilch. They have bigger fish to fry, like the teachings on ecumenism and religious freedom.

The Tridentine Mass is somehow more reverent, more "mystical" and "artistic" than the vernacular. This line of argument confuses incomprehensibility with reverence. As even aficianados of the Latin Mass will recall, the priest often rattled it off like mumbo jumbo, as if there was no one else in the church.

That Mozart, Beethoven, and the atheist Verdi, having been commissioned to do so, wrote beautiful Kyries, Glorias and Agnus Deis, is a tribute to their genius, and sometimes to their faith. We will always have them in the concert hall and on CDs. The beautiful Gregorian chant, which requires training to do well, was seldom used in the old parish Mass anyway. It's a "loss" of a treasure hardly anyone knew we had.

Today's liturgy can be as prayerful as the celebrant and parishoners wish to make it; but it takes work -- careful preparation of the homily and choir practice of the beautiful classic hymns waiting to be sung.

"The old Latin Mass gives me a good feeling." We hear this sometimes from non-Catholics, those who visit a church during Mass, or admire it from a distance like a Medieval painting in the Louvre. I cannot contradict another's feelings.

But the Mass is not intended to be primarily a feelgood experience. The Eucharist is a community meal where we are challenged by the words of Scripture read and explained in our own language and fed by the presence of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine. It is food for our journey. To survive we must let the Spirit speak to us in language we understand.